OpenAI may be the world’s leading AI company, but COO Brad Lightcap said technology in the next year will blow away today’s AI models.

According to Business Insider, Lightcap made the comments at the 27th annual Milken Institute Global Conference.

“In the next couple of 12 months, I think the systems that we use today will be laughably bad,” the ChatGPT maker’s COO Brad Lightcap said Monday. “We think we’re going to move toward a world where they’re much more capable.”

“I think that’s a profound shift that we haven’t quite grasped,” he added, referring to what he sees happening in the next 10 years.

Companies are racing to develop and improve AI models, with OpenAI believed to be releasing ChatGPT-5 later this year, and possibly rolling out its own search engine. Meanwhile, Microsoft is working on its own large-scale AI model, MAI-1, and Anthropic continues to be a major player, with its Claude AI making remarkable strides. In addition, Apple is investing heavily to leapfrog its competitors, making it the dark horse that could upend the market, especially since the company is reportedly focusing on neural networks instead of the standard LLMs.

“We’re just scratching the surface on the full kind of set of capabilities that these systems have,” he said at the conference. “That’s going to surprise us.”